Insight into Efficient Defect Management and Reporting in Agile Testing

December 27, 2012 by Guest

It is a known fact that the main intention of software testing in any IT company is to detect bugs, and generate an accurate report containing all the detected bugs with detailed documents. However, the job of a tester in his/her organization is not just confined only to detecting bugs. In general, the job cycle of a tester starts when he/she reports a number of defects with all breakdown circumstances, remarks, and resolutions.

Lack of Flexibility in Conventional Testing Approach

On the other hand, this is not sufficient in the present-day’s agile business environment, where everyday activities are constantly modified several times within a day. So, how is it possible to make sure that only genuine and quality bugs are recorded, and efficiently hunted down with continuously evolving products?

Benefits of Agile Testing Methodologies

In agile testing methodologies, efficient bug management, and reporting plays a crucial role not only for QA (Software Quality Assurance) group, but also for many other cross functional associate team-members. The prime point is to find out the root causes that have led to the various bugs, which greatly assist in efficient process development, and risk management.

Once the bug life cycle is finally concluded, and done with several standard procedures, the QA staff ensures that they maintain an accurate bug report in the bug tracking tool, so that all the relevant info can be pulled out quickly for the future fixes. It has been perceived that from a Company’s quality assurance point of view, the process of effective defect management plays a major role in the general advancement of a sustainable software product in the present-day market conditions.

Proficient Defect Management

In the most advanced agile testing methodology, proficient defect management could greatly support both development team engineers, and software quality assurance to leap forward with additional tactics, which aid in enhancing the overall quality of the software product. In order to handle bugs or several varying issues in a well-organized method, most of the open source as well as paid defect tracking devices are presently made available in the global market.

Quick Lowdown at Various Processes

Some of the most broadly implemented testing processes focused around effective defect management are listed herein:

Identification: A Software Quality Assurance testing engineer generally has a huge responsibility to detect a good flaw in the software application, and report the same in an easily understandable manner, which could be done by taking screens or videos. Hence, defect identification, and sorting is the primary step in the process of defect management.

Categorization: Next, it is vital to allocate the precise component/category to the detected bug (performance, functional, UT, etc) in line with the company standards.

Prioritization: Next, as per business needs, the testing engineers have to prioritize various defects so as to help the company in identifying the defects that should be fixed immediately.

Assignment: After all the defects have been prioritized in line with the company needs, the next step is to allocate the defect to the respective software developer to correct it.

Resolution: During this particular step, the software developer cracks the defect, and shifts the fix to the appropriate business unit of the software product, where it was initially identified.

Verification: After resolution of the defect, the quality assurance team needs to shift solved bugs in the respective business environments to substantiate whether bugs are really fixed or not.

Closure: Lastly, if the bug is resolved perfectly, then quality assurance team will rate it as closed, and in contrast, if the bug is still reproducible, the QA team will report it again to the respective software developer team.

These are all the common steps that are practiced in the present-day agile testing methodologies in order to ensure smooth functioning of all products, and thereby ensure complete customer satisfaction.

This is a guest post by Criss Derek. Criss is a QA professional whose job role revolves around the latest Agile testing methodologies, and he takes keen interest in identifying various ways of improving the efficiency of the testing process.